As Hawaii continues to trek along the long, arduous path toward a sustainable food system, moving forward means not just growing more of our own food, but growing the mindsets of upcoming generations as well.
To take up the challenge, the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools created Grow Hawaii, an education-based project in which children explore issues of food sustainability. Last year, Grow Hawaii worked with schools and students to start school gardens. This year it coordinated a one-time Eat Local Day at six Oahu schools.
"Eat Local Day is a follow-up to the introduction of gardens, which helps connect students to food," said Dexter Kishida, school food coordinator for the Kokua Hawaii Foundation, which helps HAIS run Grow Hawaii. "Playing with food in the garden opens kids up to eating it. Where something like kale was foreign before, it is familiar now. It moves past the little school garden into the food system."
The six schools selected to participate — private schools Punahou, ‘Iolani, Windward Nazarene, Sacred Hearts and Academy of the Pacific, and the public charter school Kamaile Academy — have their own kitchens in which they prepared the special local dishes last month.
The menu was designed by chef Alan Tsuchiyama, a professor at the Culinary Institute of the Pacific at Kapiolani Community College. The lineup featured local beef in a tamale pie, Mexican-style rice and a black bean-and-feta salad with honey-lime vinaigrette. Each school included local beef for the tamale pie and a variety of local produce.
At tiny Academy of the Pacific in Nuuanu, where the student population for grades 6 to 12 is 88, Steve Nochese serves breakfast, snacks and lunch daily to about 25 students. On Eat Local Day last week, he made enough tamale pie, rice and salad for 36 plates and sold out.
Everyone seemed to enjoy the meal; for some students the appeal was ideological as well as gustatory.
Ruby Masciangell, 16, a sophomore, said the meal was good, but "it was not so much about the food as the idea behind it. I want Hawaii to become less dependent on the mainland for food. Recent events, like tsunamis and earthquakes, are scary. If they stop shipping food here, we could all die."
Christian Doles, a 17-year-old junior, said he ate the meal because of "the positive aspects of eating local: supporting the local economy and the absence of greenhouse gases generated when we import our food."
If these students seem well versed on the issues, it’s probably due to the school’s project-based, hands-on lessons in sustainability. A team of high-schoolers, for instance, is drawing plans to transform a grassy patch of land on campus into a sustainable garden. The school has already started a water catchment system, composting, a hydroponic garden and a conventional garden.
The projects give students a concrete way to use skills as they learn about them.
"These courses utilize science, technology, engineering and math," said head of school Lou Young. "I call them a living lab for learning."
Prior to the big day, much preparation went into creating the dishes and getting cafeteria staffs into gear.
Chef Tsuchiyama kept in mind various considerations while crafting the menu.
"I went online and Googled ‘what kids like to eat.’ Mexican food was right up there," he said.
From there he wanted to fulfill certain criteria.
"First, I wanted to use as many local ingredients as I could. Second, I had to do something they could actually serve in the cafeteria. It couldn’t be a regular tamale where they’re rolling it and putting it in the husk. This dish is like a shepherd’s pie but with Mexican flavoring and cornbread on top instead of mashed potatoes."
Once the menu was set, the chef served it to cafeteria staff. He cooked the food in large roasting pans "to give them a feel for it."
While Tsuchiyama was hard at work in his kitchen, the staffs were taken on farm tours and introduced to farmers "to start them talking," said Kishida.
Marcia Wright took her assignment to heart. The director of food service at Punahou was already focused on serving Hawaii-produced fare after the school’s president set an "eat local" initiative last year. Because Punahou feeds 3,000 students a day, access to local products often depends on availability. But for the special menu, she was tenacious, finding farms she didn’t even know existed. Wright even had the staff bring in lemons from home gardens.
At Punahou, the local lunch, held April 11, fit perfectly with a gardening curriculum for sixth-graders, who helped prepare and serve the food.
"They actually tried to get the other students to eat the special dishes, and almost every single student got at least one item from the menu," said Wright.
This is familiar territory for the youths, since their gardening class takes them from the garden into the kitchen. Macy’s chef Rob McDaniel visits classrooms monthly to teach students how to cook what they grow. He also teaches Wright and her staff the same recipe. Wright then procures the necessary ingredients and serves in the cafeteria what students make in class.
"It’s a triangulation at the cafeteria," said Eliza Lathrop, the school’s garden resource teacher. "We see cafeterias as institutions for kids to fill up, but I’m pushing for everyone to see the cafeteria as a classroom.
"I’m not necessarily trying to turn students into farmers," she added. "I want to make these future lawyers, doctors, politicians, etc. aware of food and its place in culture and society — what we eat and how we eat it."
